A petawatt laser facility with three beams for fast ignition research and strong-field physics applications has been
designed and is being constructed. The first beam (referred as SILEX-I) is a Ti:sapphire femto-second laser which pulse
width is 30 fs, and till now, output power has reached to 330 TW. The other two beams are Nd3+:glass lasers which
output energy are larger than 1kJ and pulse width are about 1ps and 1ns respectively. By using the technology of OPA
pumped by 800nm femtosecond laser and seeded by super-continuum spectrum white light, the three beams are
synchronized with each other without jitter time. By using the seeds from OPA pumped by femtosecond laser, and by
using the pre-amplification stage of OPCPA, the signal to noise ratio of the Nd3+:glass petawatt laser will reach to 108.
Active methods are taken to control the gain narrowing effect of the Nd3+:glass amplifiers, giving the option to compress
the chirped pulse to ultrashort pulse with width less than 400fs. Tiled multilayer dielectric coating gratings are used for
the compressor of the PW beam, which has been successfully demonstrated on a 100J picosecond Nd3+:glass laser
system.